13th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Baptism and Its Cross)

I once had an old black-and-white photo of my great grandfather, Ray Banks, standing in a river somewhere in southern Indiana, up to his waist in the water. Behind him, on the bank were a number of onlookers, watching my great grandfather, who was a Baptist minister, as he baptized one of the faithful. It’s a captivating image.

          With both my mother and father coming from Baptist traditions, it was left to us, their children, to determine when we wanted to be baptized. I remember wondering at different moments, how I would know that the time had come. Regardless, though, I really didn’t understand what baptism meant or what it would demand of me.

I would have understood it perhaps, as a commitment to a way of life or a sign of belonging, but I certainly didn’t understand it as a tomb I would enter. In our second reading, St. Paul says, ”Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Death? The Greek word baptizein literally means to immerse or bury, so yes, death. A baptismal font is intended to be a tomb we enter, much like the one Jesus was buried in.

I’m privileged to regularly have the experience of baptizing children. You may recall that there’s a part of the ritual, after the parents state the name of their child and express their desire to have the child baptized, in which the priest or deacon says directly to the child, “The Church of God receives you with great joy. In her name I sign you with the Sign of the Cross of Christ our Savior….”, as indeed a cross is traced on the child’s forehead.

The dying that comes with baptism, gives way to a new way of living: the life of grace. The font is a tomb, but it is also the womb, where those baptized emerge as newborns. And so that we might be truly aligned to Jesus in our new life, in that moment, we are given a gift: a cross. St. Francis de Sales composed a beautiful prayer, that could be fittingly spoken to the newly baptized:

The everlasting God has in His wisdom foreseen from eternity

the cross that He now presents to you as a gift from His inmost heart.

This cross He now sends you He has considered with His all-knowing eyes,

understood with His Divine mind, tested with His wise justice,

warmed with loving arms and weighed with His own hands

to see that it be not one inch too large and not one ounce too heavy for you.

He has blessed it with His holy Name, anointed it with His consolation,

taken one last glance at you and your courage, and then sent it to you from heaven,

a special greeting from God to you, an alms of the all-merciful love of God.

Yes, at baptism we were given a cross and we remind ourselves of it every time we make the Sign of the Cross, especially when it’s preceded by dipping our fingers into holy water. And today’s Gospel reminds us that to follow Jesus means embracing the cross that we received.

          The cross is something different for each one of us, and it likely evolves throughout our lives: for some it’s a chronic illness; for others it’s only a fleeting moment in which you’re called to exercise patience with someone who’s slowing you down or pushing your buttons; it may be an undesirable job that you endure, day after day; it may be the heartbreaking loss of someone you love; it might be the struggles you face in making decisions for your children. We bear our cross in all the things don’t go as we might reasonably wish they would. We bear the cross in our daily struggles.

          Too often though, we forget that the crosses are what our lives are about as Christians. We blame God or we spend so much time wishing it away that we lose sight of whatever way it was intended to shape us and help us to fulfill our baptismal call.

          But for the crosses we must bear, that’s partly why we are a Christian community: to help each other bear our crosses. The grace within, that we hold in common, sharing in our baptism in Christ Jesus; all compels us to shoulder the load together, as Simon of Cyrene did for Jesus himself. As Jesus makes clear, saying, “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it”, we learn that it’s in this dying to self that we come to be truly alive in him.